An essay collection is never one manuscript. It is fifteen pieces written over six years, for different editors, in different moods. Each one may be spotless on its own and still sit badly beside its neighbours: realise in chapter two, realize in chapter nine; one essay citing sources in notes, the next in brackets. Proofreading a collection is less about catching typos than about making the whole book read as though one hand guided it.

That work has to happen before typesetting. Once the text is in page proofs, every change costs time, money and goodwill. Here is what to work through while the manuscript is still yours to move around.

Build the style sheet first

Before you read a word for sense, decide the rules. Open a document and call it the style sheet. Everything you settle here becomes the measure for every essay.

Record the decisions you already make without thinking: -ise or -ize; serial comma or not; per cent or %; dates as 3 March 1998 rather than March 3rd; single quotation marks or double. Note the dictionary you are following — Collins, Chambers, Oxford — and any publisher's house style, which always overrides your preference. Add the recurring names, place names and specialist terms that trip people up, with their spellings and capitalisation.

Two hours here saves a fortnight later.

Consistency across the essays

The style sheet is only useful if you use it. Read the essays in running order first, then read them again out of order, which is how most readers will dip into them. Watch for:

• Names and places. Is it Zoë or Zoe, Graça or Graca? Diacritics are the first thing to slip. A person's name should be spelled identically in every mention, including the notes.
• Numbers. Pick one system and hold it: spell out one to nine and use figures from 10, or the reverse. Keep percentages, sums of money and decades consistent. It is the 1990s, never the 1990's.
• Compounds. e-book, website, decision-making; well-known novelist but a well-known name. Whatever you choose, choose it everywhere.
• Titles of works. Book, film and album titles take italics; essay, poem and song titles take single quotation marks. Mixing the two is the fastest way to look unedited.
• Historical and institutional terms. the Second World War or World War II; the Enlightenment or the enlightenment. One form, all the way through.

Then look for overlaps. If two essays tell the same anecdote, decide which one keeps it. If two make the same argument at length, flag the repetition for the author. That is an editorial conversation, not a comma fix.

UK punctuation and typography

Use single quotation marks for speech and quoted matter, with double marks only for quotes inside quotes. Punctuation sits outside the closing quote unless it belongs to the quoted words: he called it 'a mess'; she wrote, 'I was wrong.'

• Dashes: en dash for ranges (pp. 44–58, 1914–18), spaced en dashes – like this – for parenthetical asides, em dashes sparingly and consistently.
• Ellipses: three dots, spaced or closed, one style throughout.
• Abbreviations: Mr, Dr, UK, BBC with no full stops; etc., i.e. and e.g. keep theirs.
• Apostrophes: its and it's, your and you're, and no apostrophe in the 1990s.
• Spellings: -ise rather than -ize unless a proper name or title insists otherwise — organise but World Health Organization.

Check that smart quotes have not been broken by text pasted from older files. Straight quotes are a common giveaway, so flag them rather than fixing half of them by hand.

Citations, notes and references

Essays often arrive from different places — a journal, a blog, a lecture — each with its own citation habit. Normalise them. Choose author–date or notes, then convert everything to match.

Work backwards through the bibliography as well as forwards through the text. Every entry should have at least one citation; every citation should have an entry. Broken cross-references are the most common defect in a collection proof.

• Note numbering runs continuously across the book, and notes sit where the style says they sit.
• Ibid. and short forms still point to the right source after cuts and insertions.
• Page ranges use the same dash and the same level of abbreviation (44–58, not 44–8).
• Quotations match the source word for word, including poetry line breaks. Ask the author to confirm anything you cannot verify.
• URLs are consistent, resolve, and carry access dates if the style requires them.

Permissions, credits and rights

A collection is where permissions problems surface, because essays written years apart bring rights from years apart.

Make one list of every third-party element: epigraphs, song lyrics, poems, letters, diary entries, interviews, photographs, maps, tables and long extracts. For each, record who owns it, whether permission has been granted in writing, and the exact credit line requested.

Two things trip people up. Song lyrics and poetry are rarely covered by fair dealing in the way ordinary prose is, and rights holders can be hard to trace, so start early. And essays first published in magazines or online may still be under exclusive licence or tied to an embargo. Read your contracts.

Rights law differs between countries and often depends on when an author died. If a permission is unclear, take advice from the publisher's rights team or a specialist rather than guessing.

The fifteen checks at a glance

1. Style sheet signed off, with dictionary and house style noted.
2. Spelling consistent throughout.
3. Names, places and diacritics identical in every essay.
4. Dates and decades in one format.
5. Numbers and units in one format.
6. Hyphenation and compounds checked.
7. Titles styled consistently — italics or quotes.
8. Quotation marks and punctuation UK-style.
9. Dashes, ellipses and apostrophes consistent.
10. Cross-references use essay titles, not page numbers.
11. Notes numbered continuously and matching the text.
12. Citation style uniform, every entry matched.
13. Quoted material verified against the source.
14. Permissions and credit lines in place, in writing.
15. Contents page and essay titles agree with the manuscript.

Before you hand over the files

Do one last pass reading aloud the first and last paragraphs of every essay. Those are the places where a missing word or a borrowed tone shows up fastest. Then freeze the text.

Send the style sheet to the typesetter with the manuscript, along with your permissions list and a short note on anything unresolved. Agree in advance what you will and will not change at proof stage: typos and factual slips, yes; rewrites, no. Keep a change log so you can see what moved between drafts.

Typesetting is the point where the book stops being a manuscript and starts being an object. Arrive there with the text settled, and the only surprises left will be pleasant ones.

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